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Facebook Considered Harmless

IN 1995, I RECKONED everyone would teach themselves HTML and start homesteading on the web. When that didn’t happen, I spent three years on a free tutorial I figured would give the world the push it needed. It didn’t.

I was an early blogger and a late user of blogging software because, why did anybody need blogging software? Wrong. Always wrong.

In 2004, some colleagues and I contributed to the “new” Blogger. We were excited by the thought of bringing well-designed, easy-peasy, standards-compliant web publishing tools to millions of people. Now everyone can do this, we thought. And millions did.

But not everyone, it turns out, wants to blog. Blogging is hard. There’s, like, thoughts and stuff that you have to come up with, even if someone else handles the whole “what should my blog be like and what should it do and how should it be organized and what should it look like” part.

No, what most people were really looking for—or at least, what most people have responded to since such things became available—were web gizmos as easy as farting and as addictive as cigarettes. “Social software.” “Web 2.0.” Swimming pools, movie stars.

All this to preface the unremarkable yet strange to those who know me fact that yesterday I signed up for Facebook. And spent several hours messing with it. And checked it this morning before making coffee, before making breakfast for The Wife and I, before bringing The Child her strawberry milk.

Facebook is pretty. It works with Ma.gnolia. It works with Twitter. In theory it works with iLike, except that you can’t add an existing iLike account to Facebook, which is lame and sucks and iLike’s fault, and the fact that I care and am bothering to share such trivia shows how deeply assimilated I have become over the past 24 hours, eight of which I spent sleeping.

As when I joined Twitter, the first thing I noticed was how many of my friends and colleagues were already there ahead of me. Why none of them had invited me to join, bastards, I leave to their consciences, not that I’m bitter. They redeemed themselves by responding within an hour or less when I asked to be their “friends,” not that I’m keeping score.

I don’t need more friends and I don’t need more contacts. I avoided most of the first-generation social software that was all about Rolodex building, and only gave in to the main one everyone knows and which I shall not name when a loved old client of mine invited me to join his network. Since I made that mistake, I get lots more mail, and lots more mail is something else I don’t need.

But I design interfaces so I’m supposed to know about this stuff. That’s the rationale behind my spending hours of billable time adjusting my Facebook preferences. The real reason, of course, for all this stuff, is that it provides a way to blow off work you should be doing, while creating the illusion that you are achieving something. At least in most offices, you can’t masturbate at your desk. But you can Tweet.